


let's keep our eyes on the cracks

by napricot



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack Treated Seriously, Fix-It, Gen, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 02:09:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17356949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napricot/pseuds/napricot
Summary: Y’all thought Captain Marvel was gonna save the avengers but it’s gonna be Ant Man crawling up Thanos bootyhole and expanding. Book it.Five responses to how Scott Lang and the Avengers defeated Thanos and saved the universe, or: five ways of looking at a buttsplosion.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this tweet](https://twitter.com/SaiyanMemeGod/status/1071124974507712512): _Y’all thought Captain Marvel was gonna save the avengers but it’s gonna be Ant Man crawling up Thanos bootyhole and expanding. Book it._
> 
> Title from EL VY's "Sad Case."

“Dad still won’t tell me how he and the Avengers beat Thanos!”

It was basically the first thing out of Cassie’s mouth the moment everyone sat down to dinner. Scott really shouldn’t have expected any different at a _hooray for us all being alive and/or returning to life_ dinner party. It was just—he’d really thought he and Hope could pull off a real, _adults who have our shit together_ dinner party, their first as a couple. No disasters, no supervillains, just a nice, normal, dinner party with their friends.

He’d kept the guest list small—just him, Hope, Cassie, Luis, Agent Woo, and Maggie and Paxton—and the menu was nothing fancy: roasted chicken, potatoes, some salad and a couple other sides. He’d prepared a list of possible small talk topics, vetted by Hope. She’d rolled her eyes, but she had still gone over his list to approve all of Scott’s conversational icebreakers. Well, all of them except for the entire topic of _ANT FACTS_ and all its subheadings.

 _How We Defeated Thanos_ had not been on the list of approved dinner party topics. For, god, so many reasons. Like, it wasn’t that Scott wasn’t _proud_ or anything, he was, he definitely was, he’d helped save the entire damn universe, after all, but...well, Falcon had had it right. _At what cost?_

“Honey, it’s really not appropriate conversation for the dinner table,” tried Scott, while Hope took an enormous swig of wine. No help from that corner, clearly.

“Sweetheart, we talked about this,” said Maggie in a low voice. “Your dad went through a lot during the Decimation, and we have to respect that he’s not ready to talk about it yet—”

“Oh, they think you’re _traumatized_ , homes?” said Luis. “Nah, nah, that’s not it. I mean, yeah, it was terrible, half the planet gone, but, like, the actual fight?” Luis widened his eyes and grinned broadly at the same time, which made him look pretty crazed. “That was just _badass_.”

Scott winced, and Luis realized his inadvertent pun and started cracking up.

“Uhh, so...you’re not traumatized?” asked Agent Woo, fidgeting in his seat. “This chicken is delicious, by the way, did you brine it?”

Yes, thank you, a topic that was on the approved dinner party small talk conversation list.

“Yeah! Or, not brine, but I let it soak in buttermilk, and—”

“Dad’s not traumatized! He just won’t tell me what happened!”

Scott felt a small, strong foot kick him under the table, and Cassie glowered mightily at him from across the table. He made a face back at her, so she escalated into full eyebrows of fury, then he crossed his eyes and puffed out his cheeks, and she almost broke before she angrily shoved some roast potatoes into her mouth.

“Um, I’d like to know what happened,” said Paxton. “But only if you’re feeling up to talking about it, Scott.”

“Yeah, me too,” added Agent Woo.

Maggie bit her lip apologetically and nodded. “I’m maybe sort of dying of curiosity,” she confessed.

“You should all cherish your ignorance,” said Hope, before pushing her chair back with a grimace of a smile. “I’m gonna get another couple bottles of wine. You’re all going to need it.”

“Bro, you gotta let me tell the story!” said Luis, bouncing in his chair.

“Uncle Luis tells the best stories!” said Cassie, smiling like sunshine now, all traces of fury gone.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Just—I want it known, for the record, that I did _try_ to tell you all that this story wasn’t appropriate for the dinner table.”

Agent Woo snorted. “How bad can it be? You’re fine, the Avengers are all fine, everything got fixed…”

“You’re one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Scott!” said Paxton, beaming, as he raised a glass of wine in Scott’s direction.

Hope returned and thunked two new bottles of wine down onto the dinner table. “Uh huh! To Scott!” she said, and then there was a toast, and Scott was blushing, because Hope was only being a little sarcastic about it and the way she kissed him was equal parts sweet and wry.

Once the toast ended, Luis tapped a fork to his wineglass delicately and cleared his throat.

“Ahem. So. This is the story of how my BFF Scott totally defeated Thanos and saved the universe.”

“The other Avengers helped. Obviously,” added Scott.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, but it was all you at the end, bro! So, like, okay. Here we go. It all started with that crazy portal shit in New York, right? But, like, not the first crazy portal, though, I guess, kinda, yeah, that first crazy portal, Thor, you know, the god of thunder, he told me that portal was Thanos too, only he didn’t have all of these crazy powerful infinity stones yet—”

“The second portal,” prompted Hope, before Luis could really get going on this tangent.

“Right! The portal! So, like, there was that crazy portal shit in New York, and that was the beginning, even if we didn’t know it. But, like, Scott and Hope and her parents had that trip to the Quantum Realm scheduled and they figured they should go through with it anyway—”

Agent Woo raised his hand. “Um, excuse me, what’s the Quantum Realm?”

Hope and Scott both opened their mouths to answer, but Luis got there first.

“Oh, it’s like, where things are really, really, really small. Like smaller than a molecule, man. That quark and charm subatomic shit from Cosmos, did you watch Cosmos? It was dope. Anyway, they were headed to the Quantum Realm, and Scotty told me about it, ‘cause we had a job scheduled later that afternoon and he said he was gonna try to make it, but—well, you all know what happened that afternoon, y’know?”

“The Decimation,” whispered Paxton. He’d been one of the dusted, along with Hope and Hank and Janet.

“Which is a dumb name, by the way,” said Scott. “Us Avengers—”

Agent Woo made a skeptical noise. “Are you _really_ an Avenger now, or—?”

“ _Us Avengers_ called it the Snapture.”

“You did not!” said Cassie, wide-eyed and delighted.

“We so did,” said Scott, but he could never straight out lie to Cassie, so he amended, “Well, okay, maybe not _all_ the Avengers called it that, but me and Falcon and Bruce—the Hulk—we definitely did.”

Cassie held out her fist for a fist bump that Scott returned.

“So, you know,” continued Luis, making a poofing gesture with his hands. “Half of the planet turned to dust. I was the only one left in the office, and like, I started freaking out, right? Like everyone freaked out, but I was _freaking out_ , ‘cause I’d watched it happen to Kurt. And then all my family and cousins and shit were calling me, freaking out, and telling me who was gone, and it was a bad scene, man. You know, if you weren’t dusted. So anyway, eventually, I remembered about Scott, and I tried calling him, but no answer, duh.”

“Yeah, no cell reception in the Quantum Realm.”

“But I knew where the Quantum Van was—”

“Please don’t call it the Quantum Van,” said Hope.

“I knew where the Quantum Van was, so I went there, only Scotty wasn’t there, and neither was Hope, or Dr. Pym and Dr. Van Dyne, not big or small, but the machine was on, right? Now, I don’t know how to work that machine, and there’s no instruction manual, natch, plus, I’m scared I’m gonna step on some tiny Scotty or Hope—”

“Okay, is this part really relevant, or—” said Agent Woo.

“Okay okay okay, I’ll skip ahead. I figured it out, or at least, I pushed the right buttons, and got Scotty back and, uh, broke the news, you know?”

There was a moment of silence then. As terrifying as being stuck in the Quantum Realm for hours had been, Scott thought he was lucky, really, to have missed seeing the Snapture. To have missed watching Hope and Hank and Janet turn to ash. Luis’s secondhand hysteria and horror had been bad enough. Hope and Hank and Janet being gone had been bad enough.

“And you know this part already, Cassie,” said Scott. “I called you and your mom, made sure you were okay.”

“Then you went to find the Avengers,” prompted Cassie.

“Then we went on a road trip, yeah! We took the Quantum Van, ‘cuz we figured it could come in handy, and maybe the Avengers might need it, and we headed out! Woulda been a nice road trip, if it weren’t the end of the world and all. So, like, montage: we’re driving across these great United States of America, and I’m gonna be real with you. It was bad out there. Whole Midwest went Mad Max, for _real_. We rode real historic on the Fury Road though, like, _raawwrr, witness me!_ You know? Anyway, we got to the Avengers compound in New York eventually, and Scotty like, knocked on the door, all ‘hey team, it’s me! Ant-Man! I got a Quantum Van!’ And they let us in.”

“I did not say that,” said Scott.

“You basically said that. So like, Captain America was there and Black Widow and Thor and War Machine and that guy that turns into the Hulk, and they told us what happened. But, like, you gotta picture it. All the Avengers—well, the Avengers that were left—they looked rough, yo. Not physically, but like? Emotionally? Thor had crazy eyes going, and Cap looked dead inside, only he’d just start crying sometimes, same with Black Widow, and War Machine looked old, and it was a bad scene. So yeah, they told us that some crazy purple alien got these magic rocks and used them to kill half the population of the universe, which. Whoa.”

“You guys know this part too, it was part of the press conference,” said Scott.

“Yeah, the...time travel?” said Maggie, as if she still couldn’t believe it.

“And the time manipulation,” said Agent Woo, in a tone of deep suspicion, like he was sure it was illegal in some way.

“Yup. Time travel. We had to get the Infinity Stones back, and if we used the Quantum Realm, we could do it. There’s like, these time vortexes, and portals and stuff, so we could bust the heroes who got Snaptured out of the Soul Stone and get some of the Infinity Stones back, the ones we could get back and then put back without causing paradoxes, anyway...it was just like a bunch of heists, really. And then some reverse heists? Anyway, once Thanos was dead and we got all the Stones back, Thor rewound time to just after the Snapture. Which you know, obviously.”

“He couldn’t have rewound it all the way? It was still a hell of a mess to deal with,” said Paxton.

“Also that was a _really scary_ few hours,” said Maggie, her voice wavering, and there was a murmur of agreement around the table.

There’d still been casualties too, Scott knew. But— “Paradoxes. Trust me. Rewinding to when we did…it was for the best.”

Luis nodded, his usually bright and smiling face gone startlingly solemn. “Yeah, take it from the ride-along. Going almost full rewind was the best call. You didn’t miss out on anything good _, and_ the universe didn’t start collapsing in on itself.”

“Okay okay okay, we knew most of that already!” said Cassie. “How’d you beat the big purple guy!”

“We went to space!’ exclaims Luis. “It was the _coolest_. Like, way better than the Mad Max road trip across America. I mean, yeah, we were going for a big battle, but like. It was so cool. We were on a spaceship! Kinda cramped quarters, gotta admit, but this one time, I went on an RV trip with six other people, and that was way worse, with only one bathroom, so the spaceship was alright. And there were aliens and a talking tree and, okay, holy shit, there was this lady, this _Captain_ who was the most badass, and she could fly, and she could, like, glow and punch and like. She was like the sun, man, the _sun_ , it was so amazing. More badass than Iron Man and Thor _combined_.”

“Yeah, Colonel Danvers is pretty great,” said Scott.

“Carol is the _greatest_ ,” said Hope, a little too loud.

“So did she beat the big purple asshole?”

“Cassie, language!” said Maggie and Paxton at once.

“Would that Carol had beaten Thanos,” said Hope, and poured herself more wine. “That would’ve been a real pretty light show, huh?”

Hope smiled, bright and wide and kinda mean. Scott smiled back at her.

“Yup, sure would have!” said Scott.

“So...who did beat Thanos?” asked Agent Woo.

“ _How_ did you beat Thanos?” asked Paxton, leaning forward.

Luis beamed. “My boy Scotty here came up with the plan!”

“ _Scott_?” said Maggie, in unflattering tones of disbelief.

“I’m sorry, Scott came up with the plan? Not Captain America, the greatest tactical mind of two centuries?” asked Agent Woo.

“Nope. My plan.”

“And not Iron Man, who’s an actual genius?” asked Paxton.

“Again, no, it was my plan.”

“Not Black Widow, who’s, you know, wily and tough and a super spy?” asked Maggie.

“Nah, all Scotty!”

“So...what was the plan?” asked Agent Woo slowly.

“Tell ‘em, Scotty!”

“So, I got real small, like I do. Because I’m Ant-Man.”

Cassie put down her fork, her dinner long-forgotten, her eyes wide and avid. “And then?”

Scott closed his eyes and took a long, long swallow of his wine. Really, his plan had seemed great at the time. Foolproof. And it was, obviously, because it had worked. Just—Falcon may have had a point, about the optics of the situation. Scott’s realizing that now, faced with his precious baby girl’s shining eyes as she waits for a tale of heartwarming and thrilling heroism.

“Then I went up Thanos’s butt.”

There was total silence for many seconds.

“Excuse me?” asked Maggie.

“Scotty went up Thanos’s butt! It was super stealthy, right? Like, all the other Avengers were going blam! And pow! And bzzzz! And like, explosions, and energy beams, and thunder and lightning, and punches and kicks, and there’s Scotty, so tiny we couldn’t see him, and he went up Thanos’s backdoor, you know, up his butt. And then—”

“Oh my god,” said Agent Woo, who had apparently caught on by now. Yeah, he was a smart guy.

Hope pointed at him, and wow, okay, she was definitely a little past tipsy now. “He’s got it. The FBI agent has cracked the case!”

“No. No way,” said Paxton.

“Daddy. _Daddy_. Oh my _god_.” Cassie covered her face with her hands, and Scott winced. That didn’t seem good.

“Scott, _no_. You _didn’t_.”

“I did, Maggie. I did. And it _saved the universe_.”

Agent Woo sat back in his chair. “So wait, am I getting this right? I can’t be getting this right. You—you—”

“It was me versus butt. And I won. I won!”

“Hell yeah you did! Scotty went in there all tiny, and then he got all big, and—boom,” said Luis, making an entirely unnecessary but unfortunately illustrative hand gesture.

“You were right,” said Maggie faintly. “That was _not_ appropriate for the dinner table.”

“So that’s the story, sweetpea,” Scott said. “That’s how your daddy helped save the universe.”

Scott braced himself for tears, or worse, but then Cassie dropped her hands to reveal her face, and there was no horror or disgust or disappointment there, just supernova-bright glee.

“Daddy, that was _so awesome_!!!”

“Yeah?”

Cassie ducked down under the dinner table and popped back up on his side, flinging her arms around him to smack a kiss on his cheek.

“That was the _best_ way to beat that big purple jerk. Was it gross? I bet it was gross.”

“The _grossest_ , oh my god,” said Scott, grinning wildly, and Hope burst into giggles, and so did the rest of the table, their laughter loud and raucous and absolutely perfect.

*


	2. Chapter 2

“And you think that plan’s gonna work?” demanded the—fuck Sam’s life—talking raccoon.

“I think it’s worth discussing—” started Rhodey, only to be interrupted by the raccoon’s raucous laughter. Jesus, how did something so small have such a loud, grating laugh?

Sam was happy to be back in the land of the living and all, he really, really was, but honestly, being stuck on a spaceship with this many super-powered people and aliens felt basically the same as being stuck in the Soul Stone with them. Maybe a little bit worse, actually. The spaceship was a way more enclosed space than the Soul Stone’s whole pocket dimension or whatever.

“Your plans are all dumb!” boomed the shirtless alien dude. “Only drop me on Thanos’s head and I will scoop out his tiny eyeballs with my bare hands and then—”

Sam winced. It was a way louder space than the Soul Stone, too, given that they were currently all packed into the spaceship’s mess hall trying to come to a consensus on how to defeat Thanos with just two out of six Infinity Stones, and the less combat-oriented of the Stones no less. Yeah they’d needed the Time and Space Stones to get this far at all, but with T-minus 68 hours and counting until they were head to head with the Big Purple Toehead again, it was proving hard to cobble together a battle plan around those two Stones and this many damn superheroes.

Sam’s half-joking suggestion of _nuke him, it’s the only way to be sure_ , had been shot down forty-five minutes ago, and so had Barnes’ _if someone could just make me a magic bullet or whatever the fuck, I can shoot him in the head from very far away_ plan. That left both of them with nothing to do but play increasingly vicious rounds of tic tac toe and hangman.

T’Challa, diplomatic as always, did not dismiss the eyeball scooping out plan. “Thanos’s eyes are certainly a weak point we should consider, however, I feel that my strategy of…”

Sam sighed in unison with Barnes. This meeting was never going to be over.

This was too many damn cooks in the kitchen and then some. Sam couldn’t even remember everyone’s damn names, much less their superhero qualifications for being here. He suspected some of them didn’t even _have_ any superhero qualifications, like that smiley Latino guy tagging along with Lang, or that old white dude who kept arguing with Stark and Banner.

Finally, fifteen games of hangman later and around hour three of unproductive arguing, Steve and Stark finally called for a break.

“Yeah, okay, a meeting this big is not working out,” declared Stark. “Let’s do breakout groups, come up with some plans, then meet up again in two hours to share with the rest of the class.”

“What is this, a corporate retreat,” Sam muttered, and Barnes snorted in his seat beside him.

Steve sent a wearily amused glance Sam’s way, but he agreed with Stark. “Stark’s right. This isn’t productive. We can take a break, do some brainstorming in smaller groups, then start fresh.”

“An excellent idea, Captain Rogers,” said T’Challa, already standing.

“Uh, excuse me,” said Quill. “I think my plan’s obviously pretty great, so I don’t know why—”

“Your plan’s basically the same as the old plan,” said Stark. “You know, the one that failed because you fucked up?”

“Hey! I’d just learned that Thanos had _murdered_ my _girlfriend_ , so I think a little emotional reaction is—”

Said girlfriend, a gorgeous and scary green lady who’d busted out of the Soul Stone with the rest of them, patted Quill comfortingly on the arm.

“That’s sweet, but if Thanos kills you right in front of me, _I’m_ going to stick to the plan. I don’t care if I die again, you can’t fuck this up for us another time, Peter,” she said.

“Yeah, some of us have watched the love of our life die right in front of us twice now, and we just, you know, dealt with how it killed us inside, and did our best to win the damn war anyway,” said Steve with one of his new, scary smiles that weren’t smiles, and okay, wow. Steve clearly hadn’t handled this latest round of losing Barnes—and fifty percent of the rest of his friends and loved ones—well _at all_.

Sam elbowed Barnes, giving him the eyebrows of _handle your man_ , and Barnes kicked him under the table. But he did lean over to hug Steve and murmur sweet nothings into his ear or insults or whatever the fuck it was that those two were constantly whispering to each other while staring meaningfully into each others’ eyes, which, great, was making Steve tear up now, so maybe the hug was _not_ the best call for facilitating emotional stability. Distraction time.

“Hey, y’all heard Cap and Stark!” Sam shouted. “Meet back here in two hours with plans that aren’t so dumbass!”

There was a lot of grumbling, but everyone complied and broke off into the expected smaller groups: the Guardians and other people from space in one, the science eggheads in another, the magic and science that might as well be magic users in yet another. Sam stuck with Steve, of course, and, since Steve couldn’t be surgically separated from Barnes at this point, with Barnes too. Natasha sidled over to their corner too, and so did Lang, so it was almost like a Team Cap Accords brawl reunion.

“Where’s your sidekick?” Natasha asked Lang suspiciously. Natasha, Sam thought, probably knew everyone’s names on this spaceship, _and_ their superpowers.

“Oh, Luis? He figured the big meeting was the best time to take a shower. All the bathrooms are finally free, you know?”

Dammit, that was a really good idea. Sam hadn’t managed to snag any shower time in two days now, thanks to the cramped quarters, and he was getting kind of ripe. Playing hooky to get some uninterrupted bathroom time in was too damn tempting.

Too bad Sam had to actually be at this save-the-universe meeting. But maybe he could just duck out for fifteen minutes if they came up with a plan quickly enough.

“So, do we have any actual plans, or is the plan still to just throw everything we’ve got at Thanos?” he asked.

Steve loosened his hold on Barnes, though he still didn’t entirely let him go. Barnes didn’t seem to mind.

“I was going to draft up a tactical plan for the ideal order of attack, based on skills and power levels,” said Steve, and Natasha nodded.

“There’s enough of us that we’ve got a good shot at overwhelming Thanos. Stagger the attacks right, and we could keep him distracted enough to give someone a chance to get under his guard—”

Lang cleared his throat and raised his hand, and Steve and Natasha turned to look at him, expectant, and in Natasha’s case, kind of annoyed. This should be good.

“I’ve got a plan,” said Lang.

Sam sighed, all his hopes of a quick shower escape dissipating. “Ant-Man’s got a plan. Okay. Sure, whatever, let’s hear it.”

“So, the plan is: I get really small, right? Like, really, really small. So small Thanos won’t be able to see me.”

Steve nodded. “Okay…”

“And then, I go up his butt. Get, you know, all up in there. Then I get big. Real big, real fast. And Thanos goes—” Lang made a little ka-plow gesture with his hands, while making a faint explosion noise. “You know.”

“No. No, _hell no_ , absolutely not. That’s _not_ how this is going down. Nope, nuh uh,” said Sam.

“No, wait, I think we should hear him out,” said Barnes.

“Excuse me?” asked Sam, and glared at Barnes.

Barnes just did his big and wide innocent eyes thing and shrugged. “Seems like a sound plan to me. Or is Thanos invulnerable from the inside too?”

“Steve, you cannot think this is a good plan.”

Steve’s eyebrow furrow had gone from stern and worried to thoughtful. “I mean, so long as Lang has a clear route…”

“Natasha!” tried Sam.

“How small is really, really small?” asked Natasha.

“Small as it needs to be. Going subatomic is too risky, I’m not looking to end up in the Quantum Realm, but I can definitely go as small as an ant, maybe even microscopic small if you think Thanos will still notice a bug-sized thing. But I mean, I’ve seen the pictures? He’s pretty big, his skin looks tough. It’d be like a rhino or elephant noticing a fly.”

Natasha nodded, and she too seemed like she was taking this insane idea entirely seriously. Holy shit. The Snapture really _had_ made everyone left behind fucking lose it.

“Seems like that’s as close as we can get to a sneak attack,” said Natasha. At Sam’s noise of incoherent outrage, she gave him a chastising look. “We’ve already established that we need to either get under his guard or distract him to defeat him. The only other option right now is to overwhelm him, hit him with round after round of attacks with everything we’ve all got.”

“And no matter how many heavy hitters we have, that’s almost definitely gonna lead to high casualties,” said Steve.

“Okay, listen, I think you’re all failing to understand my actual, totally legit objection to this bugfuck crazy plan, which is: _why the fuck does Lang have to go up Thanos’s butt_. There are _other orifices available_.”

Steve and Natasha raised their eyebrows, and Barnes pressed his lips together tightly in a way that might have looked thoughtful to someone who hadn’t spent months trapped in a Soul Stone with him, but that to Sam was an extremely obvious tell that Barnes was about to smirk or laugh, and also that Barnes was about to fuck with him. Lang just cocked his head, thoughtful.

“Yeah, you’ve got a point there. I could go in one of his ears? Or his nose?” Lang said, but Barnes shook his head.

“Stealth approach,” he said, with total seriousness. “You don’t want to be in Thanos’s line of sight, or in any of our lines of fire, tiny or not. You’ve gotta go up his butt.”

“Do you _hear the words that are coming out of your mouth_ ,” Sam said, but Barnes ignored him, his lips twitching only a tiny bit.

“No, Barnes has a point,” said Natasha, and Steve nodded too, both of them looking as serious and thoughtful as if this was a normal battle plan and not total insanity.

The truly horrible thing was that this crazy plan made fucking sense. Maybe there was some science reason this wouldn’t work, but Sam couldn’t deny that so far, this basically sounded like having a possibly foolproof way to blow Thanos up from the inside while Thanos himself was none the wiser.

“We’d just have to get Lang as close as possible before he goes small,” said Steve, and Sam could practically see the tactical plan taking shape behind Steve’s eyes.

Sam hated it, he hated it so much, but—Barnes was right. They needed every advantage, and a—god, Sam couldn’t even think it—a rear entry was probably safest for Lang too. God fucking dammit. The Avengers were gonna save the universe and beat Thanos, and they were gonna do it with a buttsplosion, probably.

“Right, well, I just want y’all to think about how this win is gonna go, if this really does go down like Lang thinks it will. Like, maybe we’ll win, alright, hooray, but at what cost, huh? At what cost. Is this really the story we wanna tell the grandkids?”

“Sam, I hear where you’re coming from. It’s gonna be gruesome, and it’s not really the win any of us imagined,” said Steve, with the full on Cap voice, what the fuck. He threw an arm back around Barnes' shoulders and reeled Sam in with his other arm and squeezed, wow, sort of tightly. “But I will do anything— _anything_ —not to lose all of you again. I will go up Thanos’s butt myself, if I have to.”

“Please don’t,” whispered Barnes, and oh, _now_ Barnes was catching on to what a horrible idea this was.

Lang’s eyes were wide. “Okay, good speech, Cap. Very inspiring. But, uh, you definitely don’t have to, you have no idea how to work the Ant-Man suit. No offense, Cap...sir, Steve? No, Cap.”

Sam shook his head at Lang. He tried to convey _get it together, man_ with just his eyes, and it must have worked because Lang winced and tipped his head in acceptance.

“I don’t care what it takes to beat Thanos,” said Natasha, her voice terrifyingly flat. “I just want him dead.”

“Uh, same,” offered Barnes weakly. Steve kissed Barnes’ temple and gave Sam one last bone-crushing squeeze, then let them go.

“I’ll go run this by Tony and the other scientists, we’ll go over the new plan with them in 15, see what they make of it,” said Steve, brisk and professional like said plan was not murder via buttsplosion. Steve clapped Lang on the shoulder. “Good work, Lang. It’s not the usual tactics, but this is worth considering.”

Steve and Natasha left to huddle with Stark and the other nerds, and Sam glared at Barnes.

“Your man has gone crazy, you know that, right? You’re enabling him, you’re enabling the crazy. It was cute and touching when you had your big romantic reunion and this whole letting him treat you like his literal teddy bear thing, but now you are enabling the most insane battle plan imaginable. Now we are _all_ gonna have to watch Thanos explode from the inside out with our own two eyes, and we’ll know it’s because Lang was up his ass.”

Barnes just shrugged, unmoved by this vision of horror. “I mean, this might as well happen. You can’t tell me it’s the weirdest thing that’s happened to any of us in the last few months. Or years. Or decades.”

Lang nodded, like this made total sense.

“Seeing a talking alien raccoon really messed you up, huh,” said Lang sagely.

Barnes nodded, looking vaguely into the distance, doing his whole bullshit blue steel thing. “He has a _machine gun_. He has a lot of guns,” he murmured, then refocused on them. “Also, you know, my whole hundred year old former brainwashed assassin who’s died a bunch of times thing, that’s also really fucked me up.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” said Lang.

Sam was still feeling mean about this whole situation, and goddammit, he was _gonna_ get Barnes to crack.

“You’re gonna have to tell Shuri that this is how it went down,” he said, and ha, victory for Sam Wilson! Barnes flinched and grimaced.

“Maybe T’Challa will—”

“Oh no, he’s gonna delegate that to _you_ , White Wolf,” said Sam, and okay, he had it now, this right here was the silver lining.

Well, the silver lining apart from the whole saving the universe thing. Barnes was gonna have to look Princess Shuri in the eye—brilliant, master troll, Princess Shuri who inexplicably adored Barnes like he was her favorite grumpy uncle—and tell her _exactly_ how the Avengers had defeated Thanos, and how he’d been one of the first people to champion this particular plan.

Barnes shook his head, and assumed a noble, martyred expression.

“We all gotta make sacrifices,” he murmured, but Sam wasn’t fooled. There was some dread lurking in Barnes’ eyes at the thought of explaining all this to Shuri.

“Maybe all the eggheads will say this plan is bullshit and won’t work,” said Sam.

“Uh, excuse you, it’ll work,” said Lang, but he looked anxiously over at the knot of intense scientists surrounding Steve. As they watched, Dr. Pym put his head in his hands, and Hope swiveled her head over to Lang to give him the most incredulous look imaginable. He gave her a thumbs up in return. “I’m open to peer review though, of course.”

“Ugh. I’m gonna go take a shower.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks and credit to Pop Culture Happy Hour's Glen Weldon for the gift that is calling the dustening the Snapture.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes for vomiting and general gore thanks to Thanos's gruesome, post-buttsplosion remains.

“I need a shower. Immediately, right now, quick, is that anyone’s superpower? Water, controlling weather, anything?” demanded one of the humans whose name Nebula hadn’t bothered to learn. The one who used the ridiculously primitive projectile weapons.

“Hey, Lang warned us to get out of the blast radius,” said the metal-suited man who was not Stark.

“That’s easy for the people who can _fly_ to say! Oh god, I’m gonna be sick—” said the man, then promptly bent over and vomited.

Across the battlefield, which was now scattered with pieces of Thanos, a handful of the man’s teammates were doing the same. Perhaps this was one of those biological, organic responses that Nebula lacked. The sight and smell of Thanos—of her father—turned to so much meat did not make her gorge rise. Instead, something like static fizzed along the joins of her. Shock, or joy? She couldn’t tell. She looked out at the carnage of what was left of Thanos, and didn’t know what to do.

“I honestly didn’t think that would work,” said Gamora faintly. Nebula hadn’t thought it would work either.

They both surveyed what was left of the battlefield, and if Gamora’s face looked so surprised, Nebula wondered what her own face showed. What her face was capable of showing in this moment that should, perhaps, have been the happiest moment of her life. Thanos was _dead_.

“Maybe it’s still a trick,” whispered Nebula, because Thanos had done stranger, more terrible things, and with the Reality Stone, maybe he could unmake and remake himself. Maybe his pieces would come back together, a terrible puzzle, and maybe he’d laugh as he slaughtered them all. Gamora shook her head in denial, but her eyes still darted wildly around the battlefield, as if to catch any sight of movement from the remains of Thanos.

Nebula tightened her grip on her weapons and watched as Thor, covered in gore, picked his way across the battlefield, swinging his axe warily and looking this way and that, as if he too worried that Thanos’s pieces could reanimate, or reform. The shrinking and expanding man had not yet returned to his normal size; he was staggering about as if drunk, and his giggles and enormous footfalls made the ground tremble. The winged woman flew up to his ear and evidently talked some sense into him, because he shrank back down to normal human size, only to immediately vomit.

“Hey! Where the hell’s the Gauntlet?” called out Stark. “Lang, if you blew the Gauntlet up too, I swear—”

“If he’d destroyed the Gauntlet, none of us would be standing here,” said Thor. “The release of energy would be enough to destroy the half of the universe that still remains. It was just thrown with, you know, the other chunks.” Thor began peering around, and Nebula found herself doing the same. “Everyone, look for the Gauntlet!”

“Sound off if you’re injured!” someone else called out, and then another voice asked, “Is everyone accounted for? Any casualties?”

Nebula let it all wash over her. It didn’t seem relevant. The Guardians slowly converged around her and Gamora, and she didn’t know why they had put their weapons down. Quill embraced Gamora carefully, as Mantis approached Nebula.

“He is gone, Nebula. He is truly gone,” she said, in her whispery soft voice.

“How do you know?” demanded Nebula.

Mantis wrung her hands. “I touched a…piece. And there was nothing there. No feelings, no life. He is _dead_!”

Rocket hopped down from Groot’s shoulder and nodded briskly.

“Oh good, so I won’t get killed if I go get the Gauntlet? Groot, quick, we gotta find it, we could make so much—”

“Found it!” called out one of the humans, the one with mechanical wings. “Found the Gauntlet! Oh, _gross_ , his hand is still in it—”

Now everyone converged around the winged man and the Gauntlet, and Nebula followed, for lack of anything better to do.

So. Thanos was dead. Truly, irretrievably dead. There was work to do yet, Nebula had paid _some_ attention to all the planning and discussion on the trip here, so she knew they had to use the Stones to undo Thanos’s atrocities, had to rebuild what destruction couldn’t be undone, had to deal with the Stones themselves…none of that seemed like anything Nebula could help with. She was what Thanos had made her: an assassin.

She’d wanted the killing blow for herself.

Gruesome as this death was, Thanos hadn’t _felt_ it, not truly. Between the crush of people, Nebula spotted the glint and gleam of the Gauntlet and its Stones, and her hand twitched with the urge to snatch it. Not to undo his death, no, but to _re_ -do it. To replay it in the exact same gruesome, ridiculous way, only slower, agonizingly slower. She wanted to make Thanos feel every second of it, wanted him to know how it was happening, why. She wanted him to know exactly what it felt like to be torn apart, she wanted to suspend him in that moment of knowing for an eternity.

After all, he had done it to her.

There was a terrible grating sound coming out of her throat, her mouth, as if something in the machinery of her was malfunctioning. She didn’t know what. She was unhurt. And yet Gamora slipped out of Quill’s arms and came to her, held her, whispered soothing, nonsensical things into her ear.

_It’s okay, it’s over, we’re alive, he won’t hurt us again, it’s over, it’s finally over, he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead_.

Nebula hid her face in her sister’s hair and tried to believe her. She rattled and shook in Gamora’s strong arms, like a spaceship coming apart on re-entry. Ridiculous. Nebula was stronger than this, she _had_ to be stronger than this. Even if Thanos was really—

_It’s done, it’s over, we’re free, we’re free_ , said Gamora, and still, still, that awful, grating and rasping noise coming out of her. Nebula didn’t know how to make it stop.

Eventually, after Nebula didn’t know how long, they both finally stopped and pulled apart. There were tear tracks on Gamora’s face, but she was smiling. Nebula wasn’t sure her face could quite replicate the expression; she tried anyway, and Gamora’s smile grew brighter.

“Uh, Gamora, babe, we could use some help over here with the Soul Stone!” called out Quill, and Gamora rolled her eyes, gave Nebula one more quick hug, then slipped away.

Nebula hung back from the crowd of people and watched. The multi-colored glow of the Infinity Stones began to rise as those who could use them set about repairing and resurrecting what Thanos had destroyed.

“Okay everybody, get your arms and legs inside Dr. Strange’s time bubble, or you’re gonna be leaving pieces of yourself in the wrong timeline!” called out Stark, and Nebula rolled her eyes, but she did take a few steps forward, just in case.

Nebula wasn’t the only one doing her best to stay away from the crush of people: the Asgardian woman, Valkyrie, ambled over to join her, hips swaying. Her white armor was splattered with Thanos’s and his Outriders’ blood; she had been part of the first charge, meant to distract and injure Thanos, and she had held her own admirably against a Titan. Nebula didn’t know when she’d had the time or opportunity, but Valkyrie had exchanged her sword for a bottle of some variety of liquor. She held the bottle out to Nebula, one eyebrow raised.

“You look like you could use this more than I can,” she said, a sly smile tilting up a corner of her generous mouth.

She really had been _very_ impressive in battle. Nebula took the bottle and drank. The liquor’s warmth settled inside her, hot and sharp like a signal flare, a welcome shock of feeling. She passed the bottle back to Valkyrie, who took a deep swallow of her own.

“What happens next?” Nebula asked. A golden and green dome of energy engulfed all of them. “Apart from the time whatever.”

“We fix what Thanos broke,” said Valkyrie, then she squinted at Nebula, and handed the bottle to her again. “You look like a woman who wants a fight.”

“ _Yes_.”

“I know a place. A literal garbage planet, but you won’t be lacking in fights. Get it out of your system, fight out your, you know, feelings, and make some money while you’re at it. Then you’re free.”

Valkyrie made it sound easy. “I’m not sure I know what that means,” admitted Nebula, and took another swig from the bottle, the bottle’s mouth still faintly warm from Valkyrie’s lips, before passing the bottle back to her.

“You’ll have to figure it out,” said Valkyrie, not unkindly.


	4. Chapter 4

Nick watched the TV screen through the bottom of a whiskey glass as the Avengers, officially Earth’s Mightiest Heroes now, tried to thread the needle of telling the world they were safe from Thanos without actually telling anyone how, exactly, that had come about. Nick knew though. No amount of technobabble and misdirection fooled him. God help him, but he fucking knew. _You’re gonna want a drink for this,_ Natasha had said before she told him, her voice warm and elated and exhausted over the phone, and goddamnit, she’d been right. She’d fucking _lowballed_ it, even.

So now Nick was at his favorite dive bar, hoping for some dutch courage before facing the Avengers et al. with a straight face. He’d get back to work tomorrow, after the whiskey had worked its blurring magic. And after he’d come up with enough cryptic things to say that suggested he’d known all along that this was how it would go down.

Shit, maybe he should have recruited Lang into the Avengers years ago.

Someone sat next to him at the bar, and Nick hid his smile in his glass until he was sure he could look at her without embarrassing himself. He had a _reputation_ to uphold, dammit.

“Carol, this wasn’t really what I had in mind when I paged you,” he said, gesturing towards the press conference playing on the TV above the bar. The original Avengers plus Lang and T’Challa were all seated at a long table, facing the press, while the rest of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes stood behind them, making their very best attempts at keeping straight faces.

Carol shrugged. “Yeah, I was gonna handle it? But honestly, it was a pretty good plan. Brought real lateral thinking to the problem. And hey, it did work!”

Nick couldn’t deny that. He sighed, reached behind the bar for a bottle of whiskey, and poured Carol a shot. She tossed it back fast and easy, the only hint that it had any effect on her in the relaxing of her shoulders.

“Plus, it was really, really funny,” added Carol.

“Was there really _no_ better plan? Or was _send Lang up Thanos’s ass_ Plan A right from the start?”

“Listen, I know what it sounds like, but we _did_ run the numbers. There was, you know, an optimal speed for enlargement, an ideal size for Lang to expand to, timing it right to make sure we didn’t have any unnecessary casualties…I could’ve punched Thanos into paste, sure, but there’d have been a lot of collateral damage during the fight.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” said Nick with a sigh, because she wasn’t wrong, then finally turned to look at her properly. The last twenty years and change had taken plenty from Nick, not limited to an eye and all his hair, but Carol looked the same as ever. The same bright, hazel eyes and sly smile, with only a few new wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes to mark the passage of years. “Glad to see you back on Earth, Danvers.”

She grinned, small and almost furtive. “Nice to see you too, Agent Fury,” she said, and bumped him with her shoulder. “Thanks for taking care of my cat.”

“Excuse you, I think he’s _my_ cat now. _And_ it’s Director Fury. Or it was, anyway. But then I ‘died’ and Cap burned my agency to the ground.”

“Uh…sorry?”

Nick sighed. “No, it was for the best. Apparently SHIELD was full of secret Nazis.”

“That sucks,” offered Carol, the sincerity in her eyes belying her flippant words. She gave him an awkward but sincere pat on the shoulder, then she turned back to the TV to let Nick get a hold of the inconvenient feelings situation happening on his face. “I’m so glad I get to skip this part,” she said, gesturing towards the press conference on the TV.

“Do you _get_ to skip it, or did you just bail?”

She smiled, wider now than before, and took another drink. “Shhh, I’m on very important space business, can’t do a press conference. Don’t tell anyone, it’s top secret.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Nick told her.

On the TV, a haggard and somewhat crazy-eyed reporter asked the Avengers, “So can you confirm, with 100% certainty, that Thanos is dead? Do you have any proof to offer the frightened people of Earth?”

Stark sighed and put his head in his hands, while Rogers and T’Challa maintained their dignified, serious expressions with admirable commitment. Lang leaned forwards towards his microphone.

“Oh, we are sure alright. 110% sure.”

“Listen, we get that everyone wants some reassurance here, some closure. We can, in fact, confirm with 100% certainty that Thanos is dead. And, uh, we do have proof. It’s just—kinda grisly. Thanos ended up in…a lot of pieces,” said Stark.

“How many pieces,” asked the reporter slowly.

“A lot. Like, we definitely did not keep count. That would have been logistically improbable, at best,” said Stark, by now starting to look decidedly wild around the eyes.

“Ever seen a man step on a landmine? It was like that. Only more purple,” said Rogers, and Nick laughed. Now that Nick wasn’t his CO, he could appreciate the charms of an out-of-fucks-to-give Steve Rogers.

The people at the press conference didn’t quite have the same appreciation, given the situation. A rippling murmur of disgust and alarm rose up among the gathered reporters.

“Jesus Christ, Steve, you’re the one who’s supposed to be good at this—” hissed Stark, and Nick took that as a cue to refill his glass.

He was so fucking glad this particular part of this particular clusterfuck wasn’t his responsibility.


	5. Chapter 5

“Tony, this press conference cannot go like the one where you told everybody you’re Iron Man,” said Pepper as she fussed with his hair.

“Why not? That press conference went great!”

“Hmm, yeah, no, not really? Given that the whole point of that press conference was to _not_ tell the world you were Iron Man. You had cards, remember? Cards with words to that effect? And yet—”

“Okay, yes, I see your point, but it all turned out okay! And we will definitely not tell our traumatized planet that we defeated Thanos with a buttsplosion.”

It was the unanimous decision of the Avengers, both old and new: they could not reveal this terrible truth. Not yet, anyway. The people of Earth had, frankly, had a weird and upsetting enough week as it was, it was time for tales of reassuring heroism, not gruesome buttsplosions.

Pepper sucked in a sharp breath at the word and pressed her lips together tightly. Tony pecked her on the mouth and felt her lips twitch into a smile before she pulled back.

“You are absolutely forbidden from uttering the word _buttsplosion_ at this press conference. You can _maybe_ say fuck and shit and all kinds of curse words, it’s been a pretty crazy week, but you _cannot_ say buttsplosion. Who even came up with—”

“Blame Wilson for that one. And, honey, sweetheart, light of my life, I’ve got it, we’ve all got it, we’re gonna use enough big sciencey words and vague descriptions that no one will know Thanos was killed with a buttsplosion—”

“Please stop saying that word.”

“You got it,” he said, and kissed her again, longer this time. Pepper moved on from fussing with his hair to fussing with his suit, smoothing his collars and lapels until he gripped her hands in his. ”Hey, it’ll be fine! The press conference is gonna be _just fine_ , super reassuring and informative, very professional.”

Pepper hummed dubiously. “Well, T’Challa will do a lot of the talking, so I’m sure it won’t go too badly,” she said.

“Plus, I mean, if it _doesn’t_ go fine, it’s not really your responsibility or anything, so you can definitely just _not my circus, not my monkeys_ your way out of the room—”

“Okay, that’s really not as comforting as you think it is.”

There was a knock on the green room door and Natasha poked her head in. “We’re on in thirty, get out here, Tony.”

By the rest of the universe’s reckoning, today was just four days post-Decimation: four days of total confusion, and four days spent cleaning up the aftermath of Thanos’ invasion and the fallout of half of the planet’s population disappearing for a few hours. They’d had the benefit of a very carefully constructed and Infinity Stone-powered—ugh, Tony hated the word but there was way too much dramatic jazz hands action happening to call it anything else— _spell_ from Super Wizard Strange to limit the damage and keep the casualties low, but things were still kind of a mess out there, and the people of Earth really needed some explanations. It was time for the Avengers to provide them, or at least to try.

After the superhero roll call portion of the proceedings, Thor covered the Thanos backstory parts, and he managed to make it sound like a very compelling recitation of an epic poem, so much so that a smattering of awed reporters clapped when he finished. Then it was Tony and Steve’s turn, and they covered the actual invasion parts, until it was T’Challa’s turn to explain what everyone in the Soul Stone was up to, and then back to Tony and Steve to cover the whole time travel angle.

The first moment of real danger was when it was Lang’s turn to explain his role.

“So I bet you’re all wondering why I’m here!” said Lang with a twinkly-eyed smile that wasn’t, Tony felt, entirely appropriate to the situation. But whatever, the guy had basically just saved the universe, so… “My name’s Scott Lang. Uh, aka Ant-Man. You may recognize me from that thing, in the San Francisco Bay, where I was, like, a giant?

“So why are you called _Ant-Man_?” called out one reporter.

“Ha, good one! Anyway. It’s a long story…” said Lang, and proceeded to tell basically his entire life story, or what Tony assumed was his life story, honestly, he stopped paying attention after about two minutes in favor of engaging in some mental wedding planning.

He kept half an ear out for the word _buttsplosion_ and contemplated whether Pepper would approve of going full Iron Man for the color scheme or if they should just stick to red and gold accents, and what they should give as wedding favors—maybe donations to post-Decimation relief efforts? That was a responsible, generous wedding favor, right? He was still mentally debating it and drafting a memo to Pepper in favor of the favors when Steve kicked him under the table. Shit, was he supposed to say something? He mentally rewound the last few seconds.

“…and so I used the Pym particle technology to shrink small enough to make a covert approach on the microscopic level, then, through manipulation of Thanos’s internal organs, disrupted Thanos’s bodily integrity, leading to his defeat.”

Ha! The word buttsplosion appeared nowhere in that vague as hell, not entirely sensical explanation! He smiled over at Pepper where she was standing in the corner of the conference room.

“It’s hard to explain in layman’s terms,” said Tony, aiming for the exact right tone of flippant and assured intelligence that had led countless investors to fork over unimaginable sums of money to him. “But basically, Lang here acted as a kind of undetectable IED in Thanos’s insides while the rest of us were keeping Thanos distracted with the fight. And it worked!”

“Indeed!” boomed Thor. “It was most glorious, an ingenious and clever battle plan! After Thanos was destroyed, those of us who could use the Infinity Stones without being killed by the effort undertook to return the lost half of the universe from their imprisonment within the Soul Stone, and using the Time Stone, we rolled up the thread of time such that the Decimation was undone after but a few hours, and these works of great magic and strength were done by…”

Thor went on like that for a while, until T’Challa took over to discuss recovery efforts, and then they were free and clear except for the taking questions portion of the press conference. Which was, predictably, a shitshow.

Everyone just wanted so many fucking _details_.

“Why couldn’t you undo the Decimation entirely?”

“Why were some of these Infinity Stones on Earth at all?”

“Are the Accords no longer in effect?”

“Are the Avengers back together?”

“What does Spiderman have to do with any of this?”

“Has the Winter Soldier been exonerated and what was his role in—”

“Can you please tell us more about Captain Marvel—”

“So, I’m sorry, _how_ exactly was Thanos defeated? Did any of the Avengers maintain body cam footage of the battle—”

“How do you feel about being called Earth’s Mightiest Heroes? _Are_ you the mightiest?”

And on and on and on, until they had to least divulge the grisly details of how Thanos was definitely dead, and yes, they were sure, on account of how he was in a lot of little purple pieces. Tony could just see a couple of the more sharp-eyed reporters starting to connect the dots from a tiny-sized Ant-Man being _literally inside_ Thanos and— _thanks a lot Cap_ —to the _ever seen a man step on a landmine_ word painting of Thanos’s post-battle status.

Thankfully, before any of them could speak up, the next question was from some Fox News asshole. “Do you have any comment on Mr. Lang’s status as a convicted felon?”

Steve palpably summoned his Cap aura of Truth, Justice, and the American Way to glower at the reporter.

“Mr. Lang has served his time and repaid his debt to society in full. He’s a loving father and an upstanding member of his community, who as we’ve all just learned _helped save the entire universe_ , and his prior criminal convictions have no bearing on his extraordinary heroism. We owe our victory to him, and I know I, personally, can never thank him enough.”

Lang turned bright pink, which was cute, and a few reporters actually audibly thanked him, which was also cute, but _shit shit shit_ , Tony could see Yang from the Washington Post and Maxwell from fucking Buzzfeed of all places looking like they were not at all distracted by this touching digression. Time for a distraction.

“Listen, can I say something? I just want to say something. The Avengers aren’t perfect. I mean, that’s obvious, right? We kinda had a big, knock down, drag out fight a while back about if and how we should be accountable to all of you for just how very not perfect we are. We have all fucked up. We’ve all made mistakes. Some of those mistakes have cost people’s lives. We’ve been used, and we’ve been hurt and we’ve been broken, and some of us have hurt other people, innocent people, willingly and—and unwillingly.” Tony very deliberately didn’t look back at Barnes and Natasha andWanda at that, though he hoped they knew this applied to them too. “Every single one of us. So yeah, Lang did some time in the pokey. I was an arms dealer. We’ve got assassins and thieves and refugees and POWs and fuckups and failures. And if you wanna say that makes us unworthy of being heroes, of being _Earth’s Mightiest Heroes_? Be my guest.”

There was near total silence in the conference room, just the omnipresent sound of camera shutters and the scratch of pens, the clacking of keys. Tony let that near silence sit for a few seconds.

“But here’s the thing. Yeah, we’re not perfect, we’re not even close, none of us, but we _are_ the people who do _not_ give up. We’re the ones who get back up again to keep fighting, over and over. We’re the ones who watched Thanos turn the people we love into _ash_ and decided _no_. That’s _not_ gonna be the world we live with. We’re gonna _fix_ it. And we did.”

 _Mic drop_ , yet another press conference success, _Iron Man out_.

* * *

Tony headed straight for Pepper afterwards. He really thought he had something here with that charitable donations as wedding favors idea and he wanted to run it by her before he forgot. The bright and shining look on her beautiful face kind of derailed him though.

“That was a really good speech, Tony,” said Pepper softly, that same sweet glow in her eyes that he’d first recognized as _love_ when he’d stepped off that plane after escaping the Ten Rings. He slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her close.

“Yeah?”

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said, and kissed him with perfect tenderness. “You totally said all that to distract anyone from asking about the buttsplosion, didn’t you,” she murmured against his lips.

“Yup.”


End file.
